Top 50: Transportation key to region’s past and future

Traffic heads northbound on Interstate 95 in New Haven past Exit 46 on May 10, 2016, before lanes were shifted during construction work on the interchange.

Traffic heads northbound on Interstate 95 in New Haven past Exit 46 on May 10, 2016, before lanes were shifted during construction work on the interchange.

Photo: Peter Hvizdak / Hearst Connecticut Media File Photo

Photo: Peter Hvizdak / Hearst Connecticut Media File Photo

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Traffic heads northbound on Interstate 95 in New Haven past Exit 46 on May 10, 2016, before lanes were shifted during construction work on the interchange.

Traffic heads northbound on Interstate 95 in New Haven past Exit 46 on May 10, 2016, before lanes were shifted during construction work on the interchange.

Photo: Peter Hvizdak / Hearst Connecticut Media File Photo

Top 50: Transportation key to region’s past and future

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NEW HAVEN — The city has two interstate highways and a parkway, trains that travel to New York, Hartford and to the eastern shoreline and a regional airport minutes from downtown.

But despite millions of state and federal dollars spent on improvements, including new train cars, a new rail line to Springfield, Mass., and a completely redesigned highway interchange, the area’s transportation infrastructure fails to adequately meet the needs of a city that is home to a major university and hospital and businesses seeking to grow or move into the region, say those who want to see Greater New Haven continue as a vibrant metropolis.

Since the automobile first became popular and affordable almost 100 years ago, it has always been so.

Congestion is not new

In 1937, Mayor John W. Murphy was so concerned about the number of cars downtown that his annual message addressed the issue was:

“Like many other cities, New Haven has much traffic congestion caused by needless and excessive parking in and near the center of the city. Many persons residing near their place of employment or business in the center of the city, drive cars to the center and park them on the street or elsewhere. They could benefit their health by walking to and from business and relieve parking conditions by leaving their cars at home.”

Douglas Rae, a onetime chief administrative officer for the city who is a professor of management and political science at Yale University, quotes Murphy in his 2003 book, “City: Urbanism and Its End,” showing that New Haven was clogged with traffic even in the depths of the Depression.

In addition to the local drivers, before Jan. 2, 1958 — when Interstate 95 brought President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System to Connecticut — New Haven had to contend with thousands of drivers traveling between New York and Boston on Route 1, what we know as Columbus and Forbes avenues, including the Tomlinson Bridge.

A 1937 map by Richard Guyot Dana printed in “City” shows an 18,000-car “peak load” on the streets west of downtown.

“The main road from New York to Boston came right through downtown New Haven,” Rae said. “It was Congress Avenue and the main road to Hartford, which they called College Highway, was Whitney Avenue. It was like 12,000 cars on ordinary streets.”

In fact, “City” records that, years earlier, Mayor David Fitzgerald had written, “Those who, in the distant past, had charge of laying out our roadways … had not the faintest notion that in the streets of New Haven, in 1923, thousands of automobiles would be in operation,” parked along the narrow streets and threatening the ability of fire engines to squeeze through.

And this was at a time when a network of trolleys ran throughout the city and across the state. New Haven, the last city to feature the streetcars, saw its last trolley run on Sept. 25, 1948.

“It was really hard to get through the city” in the first half of the 20th century, Rae said. “The highway story begins with that. Any American city of any consequence became a clot of immobile traffic” between 1920 and 1940. “In those 20 years the automobile destroyed the fabric of most cities and they’ve spent the last 50 years building highways and other alternatives, often not very intelligently and often with ulterior purposes in mind.”

Moving people

Those motives often included tearing down tenements, the most well known being Oak Street, which was razed for a highway that was meant to connect New Haven with the lower Naugatuck Valley but never got there. It was part of Mayor Richard C. Lee’s urban renewal program.

“They used highway construction as a financing and political mechanism to tear all that housing out,” Rae said. Route 34 — the Oak Street Connector, later renamed the Richard C. Lee Highway — never got much farther than downtown, although space was cleared 650 wide, Rae said, much more than needed for a highway, all the way to what is now Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.

Now, the Route 34 expressway, as well as the land beyond, is being re-created to blend it into a cityscape and remove the divide between downtown and the Hill neighborhood.

While both I-95 and Interstate 91, which opened Jan. 6, 1966, made it easier to travel long distances, they too ravaged neighborhoods, especially the Wooster Square section.

“I was born on 25 Chestnut St., which no longer exists,” said Frank Gargano, 68, an independent embalmer. It was across from the former C. Cowles & Co. “Chestnut Street went all the way down to Water Street and there were tenement houses there and they were all wiped out,” he said. “Wooster Street used to go to East Street, straight through from Franklin to East.”

Many residents moved to the 72 apartments known as the Columbus Mall that was built on Wooster Street in the early 1960s, Gargano said. Displaced residents were given first choice and Gargano’s parents “did take advantage of that because they never drove,” he said.

Gargano, who has been president of the St. Andrew Society for 21 years, said the change in the neighborhood, caused by the razing of homes as well as the move to the suburbs brought on by the automobile, can be seen in the numbers who attend St. Michael Roman Catholic Church on Wooster Place, the east side of the square. In the early 1900s, there were 10,000 families who attended. “Now we’re lucky if we have 300,” he said.

I-95 cut Wooster Square off from New Haven Harbor and the former Seaside Park, a popular summer spot that no longer exists. Then I-91 sliced through Wooster, Chapel and streets north, turning to the northeast when it approached the East Rock area, paralleling State Street rather than running between Orange Street and Whitney Avenue.

“[I-91] was originally planned to go right through the fanciest part of East Rock, and the high bourgeois, the upper-income residents, rose up and stopped it, made it go closer to a working-class neighborhood, as it does now,” Rae said.

Other decisions that look poor in hindsight appeared to make sense at the time, he said. “We all look at I-95, the way it … separates the urban fabric from Long Island Sound. We all wish they had found a way to run it inland.”

In the 1950s, however, “the New Haven Harbor part of the Sound bore a close resemblance to a sewer,” Rae said. “It was a stinking mess.”

Despite the interstates, numerous downtown parking garages and lots, people still complain about parking downtown. But the most clogged roads are no longer Congress or Forbes avenues, but instead are the interstates that took on the load of through traffic.

State seeks ‘best-in-class’ system

There’s no doubt in state Transportation Commissioner James Redeker’s mind that transportation “ranks No. 1” among challenges for the state, “everywhere you look, when you talk about Connecticut’s economy and what matters to people. There hasn’t been a business survey that doesn’t make it a top priority, not as a good thing but as an impediment.”

In 2015, Redeker was charged with implementing Gov. Dannel Malloy’s 30-year $100.3 billion “Let’s Go CT!” program to create “a best-in-class transportation system for the long term,” as his proposal described it.

“The governor called me in the day after he was re-elected and said, ‘Are you ready?’ Redeker said. It began with a “$28 billion additional funding decision by the governor and legislature on top of what was a 65 percent increase in capital funding in 2015,” he said.

The five-year ramp-up to the “Let’s Go CT!” plan doubled spending, which “allowed us to catch up on investing” in all modes of transportation, including replacing the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge and the highway interchange in New Haven and the Moses Wheeler Bridge between Milford and Stratford. The projects were built despite a decrease in DOT employees from 5,000 to 3,000.

“We’ve been able to do a heck of a lot more with fewer people,” Redeker said.

The DOT also was allowed to do “design-build” projects, in which the department oversaw both the design and construction of projects, although much of the construction work has been bid out to private contractors.

In 1984, all of Interstate 84 in Southington was replaced in one weekend, Redeker said, and “since then we’ve done about 20 accelerated bridge projects. The fact is we’re doing projects with virtually no impact in terms of taking roads out of service”

Redeker calls New Haven “the epicenter of the transportation system. You’ve got a city that has focused on and we have focused with them on effective use of infrastructure,” including bicycle lanes and walking trails.

“There’s been investment; there’s been a lot of help from Yale … but it is a place that is a quality, walkable city. … You don’t have to own a car there. … You can walk safely and bike safely.”

Anthony Rescigno, who was president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce from 2000 until Garrett Sheehan took over in March, said highway congestion has improved since the New Haven Harbor interchange project was completed.

“I’m sure there was a lot of frustration with all the construction,” he said. “The construction took so long. While that was happening there’s a lot of inconvenience for people. People couldn’t get in so they just kept going. I think things will settle down now. It’s an improvement now that it’s complete.”

“That purchase, when completed, we’ll have the newest rail fleet in the country,” Redeker said. The new rail cars were necessary, he said, because “we’ve got the busiest rail system in the country.” A state-of-the-art rail maintenance facility has been built in New Haven as well.

The Hartford Line has been a success so far, with 19,767 trips in June, not including the first weekend, when rides were free, and 49,300 riders in July. The July total was double the number who rode the Amtrak train on that line in July 2017, according to the DOT.

For the future, the DOT is looking into some Metro-North trains going to Penn Station rather than Grand Central Terminal. “The ability to get to the west side of Manhattan directly with more trains is a huge possibility,” Redeker said.

While Penn Station is “pure hell; it’s just an awful place,” according to Rae, “Yale has been pushing behind the scenes for some time in this direction,” he said. “It isn’t going to get solved once and for all anytime soon.”

Train service certainly has come a long way since the 1980s and earlier, “the days of bankrupt railroads with the state subsidizing awful service,” Redeker said. “Metro-North and New Jersey Transit were created to take over bankrupt operations [of] a dilapidated railroad.”

When the M8 cars first rolled down the tracks in 2011, they were replacing cars dating from 1983, “the oldest fleet in the country with horrible performance,” Redeker said.

Part of the creation of the Hartford Line involved reinstalling double tracking along part of the north-south corridor. In the 1990s, “Amtrak sold the metal of the second set of tracks because they had no money to operate,” Redeker said.

If it was bad in Connecticut, New Jersey was worse, Redeker said, with buses rusted through and trains operating on time less than half the time. Members of a commuter wives group lay on the tracks in protest, he said.

Metro-North faces an end-of-year deadline to implement Positive Train Control, a safety feature that would prevent accidents caused by excessive speed or train collisions. Redeker said the system is “99 percent done today” with “maximum authorized speed” features already implemented. “The last feature is the feature that would keep two trains on the same track from hitting each other,” he said.

Jim Cameron, founder of the Commuter Action Group, which advocates for better rail service, said ridership on the Hartford Line has “already surpassed what their first-year estimate would be.” On the other hand, “on the New Haven Line, we still are looking at the lowest on-time performance in five years. This summer it was down to 85 percent,” he said. And until more M8 rail cars are put into service next year, “in the meantime, we have a lot of standing-room-only,” he said.

According to the Connecticut Commuter Rail Council, the New Haven Line had 19.7 million passengers this year through July, a 0.1 percent decline. The other branches’ year-to-date totals were New Canaan, 758,553; Danbury, 366,537, and Waterbury, 165,552. The council did not report total ridership for Shore Line East, which recently endured major complaints about its service, but listed an average weekday ridership through June of 1,451, down 19.3 percent, along with a 28.9. percent decline for the month of June.

Factories to ‘eds and meds’

Rae said “the larger question about New Haven and its future has got to be about trains and planes.” Cars, buses and trolleys were integral to workers getting to major factories of Sargent & Co. and Winchester Repeating Arms, which employed 36,000 workers between them. However, there has been “a huge shift in the demography of the American workers that traces roughly the [last] 50 years,” he said.

While households of the 1950s and ’60s were more likely than now to be one-career families, “now all the alphas are marrying alphas,” Rae said. “It means that virtually everybody … will have a partner who also has a career.”

But in order for both members of a couple, who both may be medical specialists, to get good jobs, one may have to work in New York because New Haven doesn’t have the needed number of jobs, he said.

“There is the threat of decline, the very real prospect of inability to compete for talent in New Haven unless New Haven is a plausible place where one or more of the jobs is in New York City, which makes trains absolutely vital,” Rae said.

“The train service to New York is not terrible, but not really good enough that you would expect somebody to do it on an everyday basis,” he said.

For Rae, “the speed and quality of the commuter rail between here and New York is a pivotal issue for Yale and the hospital and the businesses in New Haven.

In the 1940s, Rae said, the fastest train to New York was the Merchants Limited, which made the run in 1 hour, 23 minutes. “Now, the commonest scheduled time for a train to Grand Central is 2 hours and 4 minutes and the fastest is an hour, 40 minutes,” he said.

“Transportation is a key factor in the future of New Haven,” said Karen Burnaska, coordinator of Transit for Connecticut and onetime member of the state Transportation Strategy Board, which was disbanded in 2011. “To me the key is you have to have a coordinated intermodal system. … When they had these terrible accidents on Metro-North, the highway was clogged.”

Playing catch-up

While Malloy’s 30-year plan totals more than $100 billion, Redeker said, “fully two-thirds of that is about state-of-good-repair for what we have today.”

Donald Shubert, president of the Connecticut Construction Industries Association, said that means the state must spend at least $2 billion a year just to maintain infrastructure it has. But the DOT is only budgeted for $1.5 billion. “We’re not even spending at the pace we need to spend to maintain the current levels of service and systems, let alone improving mobility,” Shubert said.

“We’re in a weird situation. Every time we use money to do mobility enhancements, we’re falling behind in state of good repair,” he said.

But there isn’t agreement about how to raise the money needed, with revenue from the gasoline tax falling. Shubert believes tolls are inevitable to ease the burden on state residents by charging out-of-state drivers, including trucks traveling through the state.

“The Connecticut taxpayers can either pay 100 percent or they can pay 60 percent, and I don’t know any other taxing plan other than tolls” that raises the required amount of revenue without overburdening taxpayers, Shubert said.

According to a 2017 report by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, commissioned by the CCIA, if “Let’s Go CT!” is not fully implemented, Connecticut would miss out on “over $65 billion in benefits, wages and output for drivers and businesses,” nearly $21.4 billion in state gross domestic product over 20 years and $3.2 billion in economic activity each year.

“This includes: $675 million per year in savings for Connecticut drivers, transit riders and businesses; $2.0 billion per year in lost sales for Connecticut establishments; 10,227 lost jobs. These workers would have earned $573 million per year,” the report states.

Part of the governor’s vision is to widen I-95 to three lanes from New York to Rhode Island, which would total $11.2 billion if all sections were completed, according to “Let’s Go CT!” “If you packaged that with congestion pricing [tolls], you could effectively remove congestion over I-95,” Redeker said.

He said residents should ask, “What does our economy need to continue to grow or to avoid the downward pressure on the economy because you can’t move around? … There’s a significant impediment to growth because business can’t move their products in Connecticut” by truck, the most common way goods are delivered.

Redeker said UPS has said “every minute of delay is worth $15 million to them a year.” A step-by-step approach would be to focus on where the bottlenecks exist. “If you can free those up, you can demonstrate huge economic returns,” he said.

Shubert said there is a major cost to business if it takes too long for trucks to deliver equipment and products and while the roadways are not as crowded as they once were, there is still work to be done.

“Employers have to do various things to deal with congestion,” Shubert said. “I used to run 135 trucks. I wouldn’t run them to Hartford at 3 in the afternoon. A minute in a truck is a long time.”

Stephen Dudley, deputy director and director of transportation for the South Central Regional Council of Governments, said the major congestion in the area is at “the interchange of [Interstates] 91 and 691 in Meriden and 95 east of New Haven, where there continue to be capacity issues, not only during the week but on weekends.”

Widening I-95 from New Haven to Rhode Island has been talked about for 20 years, Dudley said, but “to date that has not seen any funding except for the piece from the Quinnipiac bridge to Exit 54” in Branford. In addition, “there continue to be questions about capacity from New Haven down to the New York line.”

“That three-lane section from New Haven to New York is one of the most congested areas of highway in our state, so it’s one that has considerable delay,” both for commuters and weekend travelers, Dudley said.

Trolleys’ golden age

Long before drivers were sitting in traffic on clogged interstates they were crawling through downtown New Haven, competing with a robust system of trolley cars that brought workers and shoppers from outer neighborhoods and nearby towns into the city and to recreational spots such as Lighthouse Point Park and Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven, making 33 million trips a year, according to Rae.

The Connecticut Co., which owned the trolleys, created Savin Rock and Lighthouse Point Park in order to draw weekend passengers, according to John Proto, executive director of the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven, which owns 98 cars, including the oldest known horse-drawn street car, a cable car from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and three classic Connecticut Co. buses.

“Trolleys were what started suburbanization,” said Jacob Wasserman, a master’s student in urban planning and transportation at UCLA who wrote a paper about the trolley system while a Yale student.

“If you had a trolley you could move to a ‘street-car suburb,’” such as Morris Cove on New Haven’s East Shore. “It expanded the city” so instead of having to walk everywhere, “everybody could travel miles and miles” for just 5 cents, Wasserman said in an interview.

According to Rae, trolleys “diverted a lot of investment and retail activity into suburban locations,” a factor in decline of big downtown department stores such as Shartenberg’s and Gamble-Desmond’s and rise of the shopping mall.

And trolleys were not as profitable as buses. In his paper, Wasserman wrote that to help push the trolleys out, the Chamber of Commerce presented a plan to convert most of downtown’s streets to one-way. The trolleys traveled in both directions. Many of those one-way streets remain so today.

“Don’t romanticize the old system because it definitely had its own problems and it was profit-driven,” he said.

But many do see the trolley era as a golden age, according to Proto. New Haven was the last city in Connecticut to keep its trolleys, which made their last run on Sept. 25, 1948. Most cities had torn up the tracks in the late thirties — Hartford ended its service in 1941.

“They had started scrapping cars like crazy,” Proto said. “The wooden cars would get torched and they would salvage what was left behind. The metal cars were scrapped.”

But when World War II required steel and fuel, buses were a low priority and New Haven’s trolleys were given a few years of added life. “Postwar, a lot of the vets came back with driver’s licenses, so it was much easier to yank the trolleys out of service,” Proto said.

“The last car that ran in New Haven was Car 1901,” he said. On the streetcars’ farewell trips, “they would actually have police on the cars because by the time the trip was over the cars would be stripped of just about everything.”

Many have said, “We rode trolleys because we wanted to. We rode buses because we had to,” Proto said. “People used to say the gentle rumble of the motors, the sway of the cars made you forget about your troubles. … People got to know their neighbors.”

Proto, 57, and his family would go to the museum on River Street every year, and he says people still well up telling him their memories of the streetcars. “I almost feel we missed out on something by not having these memories of going to the afternoon movies, going to New Haven, going to Yale Bowl,” he said.

While mass transit riders within Greater New Haven rely on a fleet of buses that are limited in their schedules and routes, the future may lie in a system like the CT Fastrak, a busway between Hartford and New Britain, which was the newest service launched by the DOT before the Hartford Line.

Redeker said that in New Haven “there are opportunities for what I’d call Fastrak Lite,” so that “everyone in an urbanized area would have a bus line within a half mile” of their homes.

An international economy

Likely the greatest impact on Greater New Haven’s economy in the 21st century will be the fate of Tweed New Haven Regional Airport and its ability to bring people into the area. The airport straddles the New Haven-East Haven line.

“We have the most underserved market in the United States,” said Tim Larson, executive director of the Tweed New Haven Airport Authority, which is fighting in court and in the General Assembly to be able to lengthen its runway from 5,600 to 6,000 feet in order to bring more airlines to the airport.

Now, there are at most four daily flights on American Eagle to Philadelphia and in December flights will begin on Saturdays to Charlotte, North Carolina, but lack of direct connections from Florida, Chicago and other distant locations mean business executives and others fly instead to New York City and area residents also avoid the regional airport.

Larson said studies have shown there are 1.4 million people in Tweed’s “catchment area,” bordered roughly by Middletown, Groton and Fairfield, “and we’re currently serving probably 30,000.” He said the desire to fly out of Tweed can be demonstrated by the fact that when American switched from DASH-8 propeller-driven planes to CRJ-200 jets, travelers out of Tweed increased 25 percent to 30 percent, “and we haven’t changed anything.”

“In the very ZIP code of 06512, within a mile of this airport, there’s 18,000 travelers that either fly, train or travel from this area that don’t use this airport because we only fly to Philly,” Larson said.

“A lot of businesses tell us they’re bringing people in from all over the world today,” Rescigno said. “It’s an international economy today.” But because of the lack of direct service to New Haven and the lack of international flights to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, “they’ll bring them into New York and they’ll meet them in New York,” he said.

“They’re finding out that being closer to Logan Airport in Boston and being next to other companies that are roughly in the same business, they’re deciding to move,” Rescigno said.

An Alexion spokeswoman, Megan Goulart, said transportation issues were not part of the company’s decision to move. “The decision to relocate our headquarters to Boston was based on the opportunity it provides for us to combine our Alexion capabilities with the leading biotech resources in Boston to drive our future growth while continuing to focus on delivery for today and building for tomorrow,” she wrote in an email.

“In addition, being located in Boston provides access to a larger biopharmaceutical talent pool and a variety of potential life science partners to further support development initiatives.” She said Alexion’s lab and research facilities remain in New Haven.

Others, however, say Tweed’s limitations hinder economic growth in the region. “It’s all anecdotal over the years,” Rescigno said. “People have said to us, ‘We want to be close to Yale and the medical school, especially in the bioscience field, and it’s difficult to run a business here. … If you don’t have good transportation systems to rely on, then they check you off.”

Sheehan said, “We have heard from many of our businesses that if we had more flights, more destinations, more frequency of flights, that would make a big difference to them.

“They work in global markets. They’re trying to get people in who are either coming as speakers or customers, suppliers, even potential new hires,” Sheehan said. “We already have this asset and it’s such a proximate location that it really makes sense to make the most out of it.”

“We’ve been a very strong proponent of Tweed New Haven Airport,” said Vincent Petrini, senior vice president of public affairs at Yale New Haven Hospital who sits on the airport authority’s board.

“We’ve worked really hard to find innovative ways for people to get in and out of the city. … There’s extraordinary assets here in New Haven that would be the envy of other cities,” said Petrini.

He said that if Tweed gets better service, the area will grow, benefiting the hospital, which has 1,541 beds on its two New Haven campuses. “Expanding that service is really critical to the future of the city and the region,” Petrini said.

“In general it’s difficult to do business in this region” because of “both the lack of a direct entry via air and the length of travel that is required via rail,” Salinas said. He is assisting the Holberton School of Software Engineering, based in San Francisco, to open a campus in New Haven in January and said, “It’s more flexible for them to fly into New York, but then it requires three hours of travel to get in,” Salinas said. “During rush hour it can be worse.

As a future-oriented entrepreneur, Salinas is frustrated by the state’s focus on 20th-century technology. “As far as the rail system is concerned, it’s just awful,” he said. “The fact that it takes on average longer now than it took 10 years ago to get to New York City is ridiculous.”

And when Metro-North rolled out its new M8 cars over the past few years, the lack of Wi-Fi and USB charging ports was “absurd to me,” Salinas said. Colleagues said the new cars seemed “like they were 10 years old. It’s like coming out with a DVD player right now,” he said.

“They’re talking about faster trains in 2030 and to me I look towards innovation and technology.” He said a tunnel, possibly under Long Island Sound, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco have, “would reduce the need for all the train issues and conversations that we have to have around moving homes, moving businesses … and we would be future-proofed at that point.”

As for widening the highways, Salinas said, “I don’t see the roads as an efficient investment long-term. … Even when you’re looking to D.C., where they have four main highways, they still have a tremendous amount of traffic. That hasn’t solved the issue.”